My Life in Three Paragraphs

When I was twelve I started attending Rugby School , and later went on to earn bachelor's and master's degrees from Cambridge, and a doctorate from Oxford. It was at Rugby that I had one of the big surprises of my life: I became a Christian. If you are interested there is a later part of this page which will tell you more about my faith perspective. My enduring memories of Cambridge are of playing with a Christian rock band, proud owners of a shabby truck which regularly attracted the attention of the police; but I think I did quite a bit of math too. I was fortunate enough to work with Michael Atiyah at Oxford, one of the great mathematicians of the postwar era, and I wrote a thesis on some generalizations of a famous result he and Iz Singer had proved in the 1960s. Atiyah encouraged me to spend time at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA, after my doctorate, so of course I went. I was very ignorant about the USA; I remember knowing that California was on one coast or the other, but not being quite sure which one.

It was in Berkeley that I met the second big surprise of my life. Her name was Liane Stevens, and after a whirlwind courtship we married at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley on 27th December, 1986. I love her. After a honeymoon spent in Marin County, Yosemite, Disneyland, Guernsey, Sark, and about three times in LAX, we returned to wintry Oxford, where I was pure mathematics tutor at Jesus College for the next twelve years. Nathan and Miriam were born in 1991 and 1994 respectively and totally restructured our lives as children do. In 1997 we took a big decision: we decided to move to a new life in State College, Pennsylvania. We arrived in 1998 and are now residents of Happy Valley!